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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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Jake Oresick
begins the poem that gives Mary Ann B. Miller’s collection, St. Peter’s B-List, its title with a vision of a dingy, back-alley bar in heaven:

I sometimes think
About the nightlife in heaven,
And I wonder if there isn’t
A dark spot on the East Side
Where on weekends Eva Cassidy sings
To dimly-lit tables in the clouds.

This
perhaps somewhat precious image (one thinks of early scenes from Mad Men or
most of Inside Llewyn Davis, nostalgic images about which we hardly care
if they ever actually existed or not) sets up a poem that draws together
Winston Churchill, King David, and Michaelangelo, among others,as members of a
rag-tag band of strivers who have done some good despitebeing broken
people—the B-list, the ones you call when your headliners drop out.If this one
poem (or at least its title) can serve as a metaphor for the whole collection,
it is not because the A-listers didn’t show up.To the contrary, of the just
over one hundred poems in the collection,over forty reference a saint in
their titles, and at least another twenty refer to a saint or sainthood or
saintliness with some form of the word “saint” within the poem itself. This
shouldn’t be too surprising for a book whose subtitle is
“Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints,” but what makes this a book about
the B-list is the way the big guns show up, or the way the rest of the poems
imply the saintliness of the non-­canonical person (or even action). These
poems aren’t
hagiography; they aren’t idealizations like Macy’s Christmas windows. They are
more like by passers’ meditations on those windows, seeing the impossible world
within with our cold, gray world superimposed over it on the glass, wondering
how to bridge the distance between the two.

As
a Protestant unfamiliar with Catholic doctrines of sainthood beyond the Catholic
Encyclopedia, I do not consider myself the primary audience for this book.
However, approaching it with an open mind, a love of poetry, and an interest in
learning more about how Catholic poets imagine their relationships to the
saints, I found nothing in this book to exclude me or keep me at a distance. In
fact, there is a helpful appendix at the back that provides brief sketches of
all the saints mentioned in the poems. (One wonders how many Catholics will
themselves be thankful for this supplement; have you ever heard of the bearded
princess, St. Wilgefortis? For that matter, why haven’t we all heard of her?
It’s a tripped-out story.)

More
importantly, much of the tone and subject matter of these poems will be quite
familiar to any religious believer in the modern age (I’m thinking in
particular of the work we print in Relief, but it could go for Image,
Ruminate, and The Cresset, too, I expect). Perhaps it should not
surprise us that Protestant and Catholic writers alike share spiritual
experiences such as the struggle between belief and doubt, the attempt to
reconcile sacred and profane, and the confrontation between holiness and one’s
own guilt. However, if we follow the late Richard John Neuhaus in believing
that Protestants and Catholics simply mean something different when they use
the word church, or if we consider the simplistic distinction sometimes
made between Catholics who emphasize God’s presence in the world and Protestants
who emphasize God’s absence, then we might well expect different forms of
poetry. But beyond the interest in saints, the striking similarities between
the two traditions stood out to me as much as any differences. It could be the
case that we are truly seeing not only more ecumenism but a dialectic pull of
each tradition toward one another in some particulars. Or it could be that
secularity—in Charles Taylor’s sense of a condition of holding all beliefs
contingently—puts the kind of pressures on both camps that draw out a certain
kind of poetry in response. In the remainder of this review, I want to consider
this phenomenon at least in terms of what this single volume taught me about
what editor Miller identifies as an “essentially Catholic” attitude: a “belief
in and hope for... eventual union with God” (xix)—an attitude Protestants may
agree to call “small-c catholic.”

First,
the “Catholic” poets in this volume have similar struggles as I do with living
out their faith: Jim Daniels rues an act of cruelty that wounded the spirit of
a coworker; C. Dale Young tries to sort out the degree of sin for youthful
theatricals imitating the real thing; Kelli Russell Agodon looks for a saint
for her anxiety; Susanna Rich visits a church on the anniversary of her father’s
death and wonders, “How can I find my father’s Jesus in me?” Rich’s sense that
a previous generation’s faith was somehow easier is very familiar to me. If
Taylor is right, then belief may have been easier in the recent past, at least
a little bit, as we have travelled a path of increasing fragility of faith. We
feel nowadays like Lorraine Healy, who heaves an ambivalent sigh at her
mother’s “docile certainty.”

Faith
matters for these poets, but in an interesting way it seems to rarely be a
problem in the way I think of it being in more typically “Protestant” poems,
and here I do think the different emphases on presence and absence start to
figure. Very few of these poems wonder, like Rich’s, where God or his saints
are. Rather, they often quite confidently invoke a saint’s aid, or narrate her
story, or transpose him to a contemporary setting where he can get up to his
old tricks; saints and the presence of God are almost literally everywhere in
these poems.

I
certainly felt like I began to appreciate better the role of the saints in the
Catholic imagination. Saints serve in these poems like weird uncles or pious
older sisters, people who show you the way and whom you think about with joy in
good times and for strength in bad, but whom you don’t necessarily want to
imitate in all respects (Srta. Wilgefortis’s beard comes to mind). They are the
ones who have gone before us and suffered injustice, oppression, or
insignificance, but made the hard choices for faith rather than comfort. Even
Healy, who wants to be dismissive of her mother’s faith, invokes St. Rita via
her mother in an ironic joke at her own expense. The saints carry power despite
oneself.

Should
you read this book? If you are looking for poetry that is pleasant to the eye
and ear and that puts many aspects of faith before you in serious and
thoughtful ways, then yes. With just a few caveats. First, so many poems on
saints do start to wear on one. I did feel like there were relatively few basic
moves: transpose the saint to the present to “make it strange,” reflect on a
saint’s story as it may relate to one’s present, confess one’s sins in a way
that invokes the saint and sometimes makes the sin seem venial, and maybe a few
more. Those are great moves, but with the exception of a few poets like Paul
Mariani, Kathleen Rooney, or Laurie Byro, I didn’t feel like many people found
ways of making their own voices distinct within those moves. Many of them
competently and even beautifully adopt the familiar lyric voice, either
elevating the mundane to its divine significance or bringing the
comfortable reader coldly down to reality. Mariani does both at the same time.
Rooney can put a smirk on your face just before she slaps it off. Byro can hold
two truths together in a way that makes you squirm. For these voices alone the
collection has real value, but do not expect to see a great diversity of poetic
form or much experimentation.

For
some readers, this book will serve like a devotional. You could easily pray
your way through it for half a year, looking to these poems to guide you toward
the holy. For others, it will serve as a document of what it feels like to seek
the face of God through the stories of his faithful followers in the early
twenty-first century. Either way, it is a helpful volume for surveying,
evaluating, and experiencing faith in poetry.

Brad Fruhauff is Editor in Chief of Relief and Assistant
Professor of English at Trinity International University.